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“Short History of the Bourgeoisie”

A still from Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie, 1970

I
n the final issue of Marxism Today (December 1991), published just
over a year after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Eric Hobsbawm argued that
“what is wrong with . . . the old centrally planned command economies of the
Soviet type is not put right simply by handing everything over to the
unrestricted free market”. The poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger (b. 1929)
echoed his concerns for a future without Communism: “It is quite likely”, he
wrote, “that our little island will have some trouble surviving. And by our
little island I don’t mean England; I mean the island of the rich . . . the
victory over Communism is a Pyrrhic victory, a phoney victory”.

Enzensberger’s first collection of poems, Verteidigung der Wölfe
(Defence of the Wolves), published in 1957 and hailed by one critic
as “the first great political poetry since Brecht”, established him as
Germany’s Angry Young Man, critical of the country’s post-war prosperity
about which hung a strong, if not always clearly defined, malaise. For
Christopher Middleton, Enzensberger’s anger was that of a “moral enragé
in a power-controlled and impervious world”. “Kurze Geschichte der
Bourgeoisie” (“Short History of the Bourgeoisie”) appears in Enzensberger’s
collection Die Furie des Verschwindens (The Fury of Disappearance),
published in 1980 at the end of another decade marked, according to his
translator Alasdair King, by “a blinkered focus on the private sphere of
family, house and garden”. But for the poet there is no refuge: the title of
the collection borrows Friedrich Hegel’s phrase describing the power of
history to erase the past and all it contains.

Enzensberger’s reputation as an intellectual contrarian was well-served by
King’s decision to translate this poem just as capitalism appeared to have
triumphed. Perhaps, in the middle of another global crisis, its time has
come again.

Short History of the Bourgeoisie

This was the moment when, for five minutes,
without noticing it,
we were immeasurably rich, generous
and electric, cooled in July,
or if it were November,
wood flown in from Finland glowed
in our Renaissance fireplaces. Funny,
everything was there, was flying in,
in a way, by itself. How elegant
we were, no one could bear us.
We threw our money about on solo-concerts,
chips, orchids in cellophane. Clouds
wrote our names. Exquisite.

Scheduled flights in all directions. Even our sighs
were on credit. Like fishwives
we scolded each other. Everyone
had his own misfortune under his seat,
close at hand. That was a shame, really.
It was so practical. Water
flowed from the taps like nothing on earth.
Do you remember? Overcome
by our tiny emotions,
we ate little. If we had only known
that it would all be over
in five minutes, the Beef Wellington
would have tasted quite, quite different.